What Are Organic Chemists Good For

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the dyes used in textiles and other commercial applications had their origins in plant and animal matter. Indeed, 

Simboli degli atomi de eorpi sepi-plici, e formule dei composti fat te con quest simboli 

FIGURE 264. Cannizzaro s system of atomic weights based upon Avogadro s Hypothesis (of 1811) and recalled in his 1858 paper and presentation at the 1860 Karlsruhe Congress. This figure is from S. Cannizzaro, Scritti Intorno Alla Teoria Molecolare Ed Atomica ed alia Notazione Chimica Di S. Cannizzaro (Palermo, 1896). 

Formule dei composti Pesi delle loro niolecole = p Calorici speciflei (leirunitA di peso = c Calorici specific delle molecole = jP X c Numeri di atomi nelle molecole = n Calorici speciflei di ciascun atomo X c n 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the precocious William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) entered the Royal College of Chemistry at the age of 15 and soon became an assistant to its Director, Professor August Wilhelm Hofrnann. By that time, coal tar had become an unwanted waste product and while commercial benzene and toluene had been obtained from coal tar by distillation, it was still considered a massive nuisance. Working in his home laboratory in London in 1856, young Perkin tried unsuccessfully to synthesize the dmg quinine but obtained instead dark tars. A modification, using the coal-tar component aniline, provided another dark substance that was found, again quite by accident, to be an excellent purple dye, that Perkin named mauve. Perkin left the university, much to Hoffmann s dismay, and built a factory to manufacture mauve financed by his father. Suddenly, a synthetic dye industry emerged and coal tar became a commodity rather than a waste product. 

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